London Stock Exchange Tackles System Problem

DMandPenfold writes "The London Stock Exchange has taken steps to resolve a system problem that occurred at 4.30pm Tuesday, which saw a delay to the start of the closing auction and knocked out automatic trades during a 42 second period. The problem occurred a day after the high profile launch of its new matching engine on the main equities market, based on the SUSE Linux system from Novell."

Comments

Sometimes

[inpher]

Sometimes I just wish that there was some kind of levy on buying and selling the same stock within a short time frame (say 24 hours), it would probably never hurt long time investors (the ones that are actually important to the companies' whose stock is being traded) and would seldom affect hedge funds and similar accounts.

From my limited knowledge it always seems like this high speed trading is the worst part of stock exchange today. Especially since everything they do echoes in the job market and affect the companies whose stock they buy and sell without any actual interest in the companies. For all they care the high speed traders never even bother knowing the names of companies whose stocks they buy and sell.

I have a hard time believing this was the intent of creating a stock market.